Site Network: Cognitive Systems | SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition | Fachbereich 03 | Universität Bremen

Giorgio de Felice

Giorgio de Felice's picture

Personal Information

Title Dr.-Ing.
Function Postdoctoral Researcher
Office 3.51
Phone 64199
eMail defelice

Affiliation

Logos

IRTG

The Capacity Lab

 

Profession

News

28 November 2012 - Carnegie Mellon University Rwanda - Distinguished Lecture: "Cognitive (Geo)Systems for Decision Support and Capacity Building" by Giorgio De Felice

Interests

Qualitative spatial reasoning and representation
Spatial cognition
Spatial data integration
Geographic Information Systems
Geographic information for disaster management

Ph.D. Project

Drastic transformations in human settlements are caused by extreme events. As a consequence, descriptions of an environment struck by an extreme event based on spatial data collected before the event becomes suddenly unreliable. On the other hand, time critical actions taken for responding to extreme events require up-to-date spatial information. Traditional methods for spatial data collection are not able to provide updated information rapidly enough, calling for the development of new data collection methods.

Reports provided by actors involved in the response operations can be considered as an alternative source of spatial information. Indeed, reports often convey spatial descriptions of the environment. The extraction of spatial descriptions from such reports can serve a fundamental role to update existing information which is usually maintained within, and by means of, Geographic Information Systems. However, spatial information conveyed by human reports has qualitative characteristics, that strongly differ from the quantitative nature of spatial information stored in Geographic Information Systems. Methodologies for integrating qualitative and quantitative spatial information are required in order to exploit human reports for updating existing descriptions of spatial knowledge.

Although a significant amount of research has been carried on how to represent and reason on qualitative data and qualitative information, relatively little work exists on developing techniques to combine the different methodologies. The work presented in my thesis extends previous works by introducing a hybrid reasoning system|able to deal with mixed qualitative-quantitative representations of spatial knowledge|combining techniques developed separately for qualitative spatial reasoning and quantitative data analysis.

The system produces descriptions of the spatial extent of those entities that have been modified by the event (such as collapsed buildings), or that were not existing before the event (such as fire or ash clouds). Furthermore, qualitative descriptions are produced for all entities in the environment. The former descriptions allow for overlaying on a map the information interpreted from human reports, while the latter triggers warning messages to people involved in decision making operations. Three main system functionalities are investigated in my work: The first allows for translating qualitative information into quantitative descriptions. The second aims at translating quantitative information into qualitative relations. Finally, the third allows for performing inference operations with information given partly qualitatively and partly quantitatively for boosting the spatial knowledge the system is able to produce.

Research Projects

IRTG Semantic Integration of Geospatial Information
http://irtg-sigi.uni-muenster.de/

The Capacity Lab
http://capacitylab.org/

Events Organized

GI Science 2010 Doctoral Colloquium, Zurich, Switzerland, 18th September 2010

curriculum vitae

Oct.2012 - Dec.2012 Teaching Assistant - Carnegie Mellon University Rwanda

Mar.2009 - Jul.2012 Doctoral Candidate - Universität Bremen - IRTG-SIGI International Research Training Group-Semantic Integration of Geospatial Information

Jun.2012 GEOCROWD Summer School on Data Management for Crowdsourced and Volunteered Geographic Information

Oct.2010 - Apr.2011 Exchange period: University at Buffalo - The State University of New York (SUNY) – LESAM group - Geography Department

Jun.2010 The Vespucci Summer Institute 2010 - "Interfacing social and environmental modeling"

Mar.2010 IFGI spring school 2010 - University of Münster

Oct.2009 COST action TU0801 “Semantic enrichment of 3D city models for sustainable development” - “3D Geo-information for Disaster Management” training school

Jan.2009 - Feb.2009 IT Consultant - aCrm Net - Design and development of ETL processes for a CRM application

May.2008 Professional Certification Program from IBM “IBM WebSphere IIS Datastage Enterprise Editino v7.5”

Dec.2007 - Sep.2008 IT Consultant - Gruppo Sapient Datel Italy - Design and development of ETL processes for a CRM application.

Oct.2007 - Dec.2007 Java Developer- Medea, Italy

2007 MSc. in Information Technology and Automation Engineering. University of L'Aquila (Italy). “Design and developing of an independent system to evaluate Quality of System for mobile video systems”

2004 BSc. in Information Technology and Automation Engineering. University of L'Aquila (Italy). Thesis topic: “Design and developing of a DVB digital streaming analysis software”

Publications